Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month

[Verve-Innovation]

Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks

[Andy-Halliday]

is there any warnings in your Webmaster tools, this is the first place I would check.

I can see that on 29/8 you lost all your search visibility (according to Search metrics).

From looking at Opensite explorer - its look like you have a lot of directory links a high %, this would be my best guest to your sudden drop.

I would do a full link analysis, and remove any toxic links - http://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

I would then go about creating more natural links. Earning links through good quality content, rather than relying on directory links to boost your link profile.

[Verve-Innovation]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your reply. Yes I checked webmaster and there is no warning. As I far I can remember I changed by website from non WWW to WWW redirection in the month of August.

Yes we have more Directory listing which I shouldnt be relying on . I am just worried whether the website being affected by any Google update . How do I check that?

[GPainter]

When last month?  Could it have been the Penguin/panda update? You can check by comparing your visits/serp with release dates of updates. You can see (some of) them here - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and here http://algoroo.com/

[RevCom]

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Page Title

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***from Majestic SEO

URL Searched For

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http://www.imperialcard.com.au/

URL Last Crawled

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13 Oct 2014

Last Crawl Result

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HTTP_406_NotAcceptable

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I did a quick check to see if you had tons of back link and got hit by the Penguin update, but you have 337 back links, but majestic seo also said there was a 406 issue on the last crawl. This is probably what effected your traffic.

Here is what can cause it and how to fix - http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/error-numbers/406-error

[DennisSeymour]

Check out RevCom's answer.

Then check this out:

• Did you get affected in the middle or the last week of the month? Check your traffic.

If you were, then you got affected by the algorithm updates during those times.

You MAY or MAY NOT have been affected by it. Maybe the links pointing to your were affected, maybe something changed in the keyword/niche rankings, maybe it's showing other new things now that pushed you a bit lower.

Now you can check out Andy's answer and do a link audit to see why you got affected.

As for the www. non www -> be sure to add the current one to webmaster tools as well.

[Verve-Innovation]

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